Transitions: The Development of Children of Immigrants

September 21, 2015

Psychology Professor Amy Marks is a co-editor of the forthcoming book Transitions: The Development of Children of Immigrants.

Immigrant children and the children of immigrants face unique developmental challenges as they navigate two distinct cultures at once. With no expert guides to lead them through the process, they find themselves acting as guides for their parents.

Transitions, co-edited by Marks, Carola Suárez-Orozco and Mona M. Abo-Zena, takes an interdisciplinary perspective as it considers how personal, social, and structural factors interact to determine a variety of trajectories of development. The editors have curated contributions from experts on topics covering ecologies, processes, and outcomes of development pertinent to immigrant-origin children.

"This important new book humanizes the experience of immigrant youth by illuminating how they cope with the numerous challenges they face in adjusting to a new country and culture,” writes Pedro A. Noguera, the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University. “Insightful, informative and thought provoking, this book will be an invaluable resource to those who seek to move beyond the headlines to understand the experience of immigrant youth."

Transitions discusses:

What makes immigrant children like all other children and what makes them unique

The challenges these children face and the opportunities their circumstances present for their development

The characteristics they are likely to share because they have immigrant parents

The differences between children of first-generation and second-generation immigrants

Transitions offers comprehensive coverage of the field’s best scholarship on the development of immigrant children, providing an overview of what the field needs to know—or at least systematically begin to ask—about the immigrant child and adolescent from a developmental perspective.

Marks is director of undergraduate and graduate studies in Suffolk University’s Psychology Department. Her research areas are at-risk youth, culture and immigration, social and emotional developmental psychology, and identity and mixed methods. Among Marks' publications are The Immigrant Paradox in Children and Adolescents and Immigrant Stories: Ethnicity and Academics in Middle Childhood.